Edgar Degas Quotes

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

I felt so insufficiently equipped, so unprepared, so weak, and at the same time it seemed to me that my reflections on art were correct. I quarreled with all the world and with myself.

the moods of sadness that come over anyone who takes up art... these dismal moods have very little compensation.

People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.

People call me the painter of dancers, but I really wish to capture movement itself.

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

The fascinating thing, is not to show the source of light, but the effect of light.

It seems to me that today if the artist wishes to be serious... he must once more sink himself in solitude.

Art is really a battle.

Drawing is your understanding of form.

A picture is a thing which requires as much knavery, as much malice, and as much vice as the perpetration of a crime. Make it untrue and add an accent of truth.

There is a kind of success that is indistinguishable from panic.

Even in front of nature one must compose.

I would like to be famous but unknown.

Women can never forgive me; they hate me, they feel that I am disarming them. I show them without their coquetry.

The secret is to follow the advice the masters give you in their works while doing something different from them.

The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.

The air we see in the paintings of the old masters is never the air we breathe.

One reproduces only that which is striking; that is to say, the necessary. Thus, one's recollections and inventions are liberated from the tyranny which nature exerts.

Make portraits of people in typical, familiar poses, being sure above all to give their faces the same kind of expression as their bodies.

I frequently lock myself in my studio. I do not often see the people I love, and in the end I shall suffer for it... painting is one's private life.

I don't admit that a woman draws that well!

One does not marry art. One ravishes it.

Once they witnessed one of his painting sold at auction for $100,000. And asked how you do it, he said, 'I feel as a horse must feel when the beautiful cup is given to the jockey.'

Nothing in art should seem accidental, not even movement

I'm glad I haven't found my style yet. I'd be bored to death.

I should like to be famous and unknown.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

These women of mine are decent, simple human beings who have no other concern than that of their physical condition... it is as though one were watching through a keyhole.

There is no such thing as Intelligence; one has intelligence of this or that. One must have intelligence only for what one is doing.

It requires courage to make a frontal attack on nature through the broad planes and the large lines and it is cowardly to do it by the facets and details. It is a battle.

What is certain is that setting a piece of nature in place and drawing it are two very different things.

There are some women who should barely be spoken to; they should only be caressed.

I'll buy a bottle for anyone who can tell me what makes a picture beautiful!

I always urged my contemporaries to look for interest and inspiration to the development and study of drawing, but they would not listen. They thought the road to salvation lay by the way of colour.

Boredom soon overcomes me when I am contemplating nature.

It's easy to have talent at 20 but what is difficult is to have talent at 50.

I would have been in mortal misery all my life for fear my wife might say, "That's a pretty little thing," after I had finished a picture.

I really have a lot of stuff in my head; if only there were insurance companies for that as there are for so many things.

Be sure to give the same expression to a person's face that you give to his body.

Do portraits of people in familiar and typical attitudes, above all give to their face the same choice of expression that one gives to their body.

Make people's portraits in familiar and typical attitudes.

A painting is above all a product of the artist's imagination, it must never be a copy. If, at a later stage, he wants to add two or three touches from nature, of course it doesn't spoil anything.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Art is vice. You don't wed it, you rape it.

I want to be famous but unknown!

Art is not what you see but what you make others see

Muses work all day long and then at night get together and dance...

We were created to look at one another, weren't we

The creation of a painting takes as much trickery and premeditation as the commitment of a crime.